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For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon
the transmission of impressions of any kind made upon the air, we
have only to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a
fire and the stars and their very shapes.
No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the
darkness and come to us in linked progression; if the fire thus
rayed out its own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In
the blackest night, when the very stars are hidden and show no
gleam of their light, we can see the fire of the beacon-stations
and of maritime signal-towers.
Now if, in defiance of all that the senses tell us, we are to
believe that in these examples the fire [as light] traverses the
air, then, in so far as anything is visible, it must be that
dimmed reproduction in the air, not the fire itself. But if an
object can be seen on the other side of some intervening
darkness, much more would it be visible with nothing intervening.
We may hold one thing certain: the impossibility of vision
without an intervening substance does not depend upon that
absence in itself: the sole reason is that, with the absence,
there would be an end to the sympathy reigning in the living
whole and relating the parts to each other in an existent unity.
Perception of every kind seems to depend on the fact that our
universe is a whole sympathetic to itself: that it is so, appears
from the universal participation in power from member to member,
and especially in remote power.
No doubt it would be worth enquiry- though we pass it for the
present- what would take place if there were another kosmos,
another living whole having no contact with this one, and the far
ridges of our heavens had sight: would our sphere see that other
as from a mutually present distance, or could there be no dealing
at all from this to that?
To return; there is a further consideration showing that sight is
not brought about by this alleged modification of the
intervenient.
Any modification of the air substance would necessarily be
corporeal: there must be such an impression as is made upon
sealing wax. But this would require that each part of the object
of vision be impressed on some corresponding portion of the
intervenient: the intervenient, however, in actual contact with
the eye would be just that portion whose dimensions the pupil is
capable of receiving. But as a matter of fact the entire object
appears before the pupil; and it is seen entire by all within
that air space for a great extent, in front, sideways, close at
hand, from the back, as long as the line of vision is not
blocked. This shows that any given portion of the air contains
the object of vision, in face view so to speak, and, at once, we
are confronted by no merely corporeal phenomena; the facts are
explicable only as depending upon the greater laws, the
spiritual, of a living being one and self-sensitive.
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